Literacy Narrative

Personal Story

Last year I joined a military academy New Mexico Military Institute, which is abbreviated as NMMI. The reason I wanted to talk about this school was because it is the first time ever that someone from our country attended the school. There were only five students and we were distributed to different troops so we won’t be interacting with each other. It was like this because they wanted us to improve our English language by talking only to English native speakers. It was somewhat a difficult experience because the academics were a little hard also spending all day throughout the week with new people was a little weird. Especially getting along with my new roommate was a little hard to me. He was on the football team, so we had a lot of his friends coming to our room. But, fortunately, I am not a shy person, and so I was not afraid of making some mistakes when I talk. Almost every one of my friends was helpful and they always tried to help me, but of course I had some friends that made fun of me and teased my accent, eventually they were the most that admired me and liked me.

The socializing part was not the only hard part for me to adjust to because there was the military and the academic part. The military part consisted of all the new orders and commands that I had to memorize and act upon it accordingly. Since the commands were done in English, I had difficulties in following them. All I could do was observe what the other did and copy them. With time, I got used to the command words and ascribed a meaning to them. After I master the English language, I came to realize that most of my ascribed meanings were correct. The thing I enjoyed most was the cadence and the singing, where we had special songs for every occasion. The difference was that there were marching songs and running songs, and each kind has a special kind of rhythm and base. The ideology was to keep stepping on the same foot whether we are marching or running. I still memorize some of the songs because some are very motivating, and some are somewhat funny.

Moving to the academic part of my experience, which I think was the hardest and most challenging portion of my experience, I tried my best to fit in and learn. I found academics hard for me because of many social and cultural factors. The first semester was the hardest because we had our schedule done for us in advance before we started the semester. In addition, we could not drop or change anything in the schedule for the first semester, so we had to do all the subjects as given. We had to take 21 credits, and we did not have a strong foundation in some subjects like chemistry and history. But still we had to work hard and pass since we were left with no choice. We could create free time and study effectively to ensure we understood all the course work. In addition, we had a big load of homework’s every day, so we used our free time between the periods to do homework.

Another hurdle in my learning was to understand the course content since it was written in another language that I had little knowledge about. It required me to study and understand English language. As mentioned earlier, some students could help me in learning the language. I could engage them in conversations where I learnt how they used their words in sentences. Sometimes I found communicating with them a hard task since I did not know many words. Particularly, when I wanted assistance in my studies, those who offered to help could use English to explain to me. It was difficult for me to follow their explanations at first, but I motivated myself to learn more of the language. One of our language instructors advised me to read many literature and storybook to boost my language skills.

The schedule was very tight that we had no time to relax from sunrise till midnight. First we went to lectures till 3 pm, after which we headed to the fields to start our physical education session every day. The physical activities were more like physical torture for 2 hours, with push-ups, sit-ups and running. Then we headed back to the barracks to get ready for dinner. Finally after that we were left alone to study in our rooms and we could get in trouble if we were not studying. My average studying time was 6 hours per day which will sum up to 42 hours every week. It was a tough schedule to deal with but I had a lot of experience and I had really improved. Within a few months of study, I was able to understand most of the concepts in English and also pass most of the module taught in English.